On Sat, Nov 6, 2010 at 00:53, Marcus Buck
<me(a)marcusbuck.org> wrote:
An'n 05.11.2010 23:44, hett Fred Bauder
schreven:
How many billions in potential advertising
revenue do we leave on the
table each year?
Fred
According to
alexa.com Facebook has a 3-month global pageview share of
4.74010%. Wikipedia has 0.52984%. That's about 1/9th. According to
Wikipedia Facebook made US$800 million in revenue in 2009. 1/9th is
US$89 million. Of course that's not a realistic number. Just an
extremely vague approximation of an theoretically possible value.
Wikipedia has the advantage that our content has very defined topics and
ads matching the article's topic should be much more relevant and
interesting to the user than Facebook's ads. But on the other hand
Wikipedia is much more limited and cannot use prominent and intrusive
ads, which will limit the possible revenue. And of course Facebook has
(again according to Wikipedia) 1700+ employees while Wikimedia has just
a small fraction of that. It's hardly possible to create similar revenue
as Facebook without additional employees.
Even will all their revenue, Facebook is not yet profitable.
Thanks for making approximation!
I was thinking that WMF and chapters would have much more money with
ads. However, ~$100M is not so bigger amount than $20-22M. Besides
that, all chapters except WM DE are far from reaching the limits
(while WM DE is not so close to reach the limits). Also, organizations
should have capacities to spend money, which should be built through
the time.
In other words, it seems that we definitely don't need ads.
No, we don't *need* ads. But think how much we could improve our
infrastructure and software with that money. Think how much content we
could help to free. And think how much more international we could
become. Personally I think the sacrifice we'd make by advertising is
too great, but you have to at least admit it's a tempting proposition.
Anyway, here's some analysis of this very question done back in 2006.
Estimates for annual revenue from adverts ranged from $42 billion to
$100 billion, and that's without accounting for our growth since then.